How To Create An Animated Gif? from a video

[darran 0]

I tried searching on the forum, but I could find nothing about how this is doneBasically, I want to create an animated gif which is derived from a video. Lets say I have this video file, and I want to create an animated gif which shows what the video is about. I have already trimed the video appropriately but when I tried doing it, I ended up with a 8.32 MB animated gif. I thought animated gif was supposed to be lightweight, can anyone help me?Thanks in advance

[ink 0]

It's lightweight when you customize it to be so It depends on the quality ofcourse. You could use Jasc Animation shop, just load the file, choose how many frames you want there to be, trim if necessary, resize if necessary, then save, and in the optimization menu walk-through thingie, take the steps to minimize the file size by choosing the amount of colors and stuff. So yeah, the more frames, the bigger the size, and the less compression of the images, the bigger the file size will be aswell. Ofcourse a smooth 5 second duration .gif file with image size 1024x768 pixels will be huuuuge.

[tractor 0]

If you want to animate .gif images i suggest getting unFREEze gif animator. (Search it on google) it works well and lets you pick how many frames per second but it dosn't let you do much. I would suggest looking on https://www.google.de/?gfe_rd=cr&ei=BwkjVKfAD8uH8QfckIGgCQ&gws_rd=ssl

[ghostrider 0]

What might be happening is that each of your frames might have its own palette. Each palette in a GIF file takes up 768 bytes, if you have a lot of frames that really adds up. Try using GIF Construction Set (google it), it has a lot of ways that it can decrease file size. You one palette for the entire thing, but this limits you to a total of 256 colors. Decreasing your frame rate will also decrease the size of your video by A LOT.

[matak 2]

good question darran. i had some problems when making gif files from Flash MX 2004, i couldn't make animated gif file right. flash just exported SWF in images (i had about 20 frames and Flash exported 20 *.gif files).I might just try one of these programs. I guess both of them can be found in Trial version and i hope at least one is free

[Sharn 0]

Quick question. Do you have Photoshop and Imageready? If so, you *can* open some video files in Imageready, and take out every x frames. It's used for making those animated sigs with small vids in them. (I've done a couple)If you have those, reply back and I'll try to help.

[darran 0]

Wow ... I didn't expect to have 5 replies in just less than 2 days. Really amazing feedback. unFREEze: This application just threads all the gif images, what I need is an application which will help me to take a video and return many gif images for me to thread it through. I will give this applications a try and let you know- Jasc Animation (By far the most promising) Is the full name animation shop 3?- GIF Construction Set (I suppose this simply reduce the frame rate but does not construct the animated gif I want)@Sharn: I have photoshop and imageready but I had no idea they could accept video files. I took a look at the formats they accept, but I don't see any wmv or even mpg for that matter so how do you put those files into imageready?I think a potential problem could be because I am using a wmv as my source file to trim the video and then the format I work with is wmv, does anyone knows if this plays a difference?

Edited November 15, 2006 by darran (see edit history)

[kdr_98 0]

- Jasc Animation (By far the most promising) Is the full name animation shop 3?

This is a part 'Paint shop Pro' there is a trial version available (of 30 days I think).
I used to use this program for making aniamted Gifs (works fine).
You can add an gif image (and setup also the time to display).

You can also add some (predefined) transittions.
The program used to by Jasc, but I think Corel has bought the program and Corel sells it now.
There are still some shareware sites on the internet where you can download the programm.

[Reaper 0]

it is pretty straight forward first you need to go and find a program to do this and then download it. most of the programs are free and the ones that arn't are demos foe a certain period of time. so it should be quite easy to find one that wil lsuit your need just go to google and search for make animated gifs or make animated picture or something like that and you should find a few programs to do this type of thing ! normally these programs will take any picture format so you just go and find the pictures you want to animate and put it into the program and then create it and then it is all done you have an animated picture to look at or use or do anything with It is that easy there are no hard things or catches

[darran 0]

it is pretty straight forward first you need to go and find a program to do this and then download it. most of the programs are free and the ones that arn't are demos foe a certain period of time. so it should be quite easy to find one that wil lsuit your need just go to google and search for make animated gifs or make animated picture or something like that and you should find a few programs to do this type of thing !
normally these programs will take any picture format so you just go and find the pictures you want to animate and put it into the program and then create it and then it is all done you have an animated picture to look at or use or do anything with

It is that easy there are no hard things or catches

I think you have totally misunderstood my intention. I am sure there are a lot of free softwares which will do the animation of images for you. I already have Adobe ImageReady and it does that for me. What I want to do is take a video, and then create an animated gif out of it using a program(s). I do not mind the process, because the last time I did it, it was so laggy and came up to 8 mb +. The programs which I used before was Bink and Smacker's RAD video tools which converts the video into 2000+ gif images of 42 kb each and Unfreeze which threads these images together.

[Avalon 1]

I have found most animation programs such as ImageReady will not import .wmv files, they will however usually import .avi files. If you convert your video to .avi format then you should be able work with it in ImageReady. I use a program called Video Cleaner Pro to convert video formats, I'm sure there are many others. Once imported into ImageReady you will have a very big animated gif. From there you will need to keep optimizing the files by reducing colors and removing frames until you have it down to an acceptable size. I also use a program called GIF Moviegear which is very good for optimizing gif files. No matter how you do it, you will have a trade-off between quality and file size to get what you want. If the gif is to be a sample of another video, you might try reducing the colors down to 16 color greyscale. If found this to be about the lowest color resolution I could use and still have a reasonable output when I tried to do something similar.

[darran 0]

I have found most animation programs such as ImageReady will not import .wmv files, they will however usually import .avi files. If you convert your video to .avi format then you should be able work with it in ImageReady. I use a program called Video Cleaner Pro to convert video formats, I'm sure there are many others. Once imported into ImageReady you will have a very big animated gif. From there you will need to keep optimizing the files by reducing colors and removing frames until you have it down to an acceptable size. I also use a program called GIF Moviegear which is very good for optimizing gif files. No matter how you do it, you will have a trade-off between quality and file size to get what you want. If the gif is to be a sample of another video, you might try reducing the colors down to 16 color greyscale. If found this to be about the lowest color resolution I could use and still have a reasonable output when I tried to do something similar.

 

Do you have any good free converters which will convert my wmv to avi files successfully? I think this could be the easiest solution, but do enlighten me on this. Once imported into Imageready, there would be something like a lot of frames in the animation window, and how do we reduce the colors of each particular frame?

[ARDILLA 0]

I tried searching on the forum, but I could find nothing about how this is done

 

Basically, I want to create an animated gif which is derived from a video. Lets say I have this video file, and I want to create an animated gif which shows what the video is about. I have already trimed the video appropriately but when I tried doing it, I ended up with a 8.32 MB animated gif.

 

I thought animated gif was supposed to be lightweight, can anyone help me?

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

as i understand, you want to create gif from video file? why not just to get it with the special program as VidGif, for example? i make it in such a way, very easy. if you need it, here it is

[darran 0]

I just tested this program; VidGif, but the problem is that the free version would have their logo at the side of the animation. Is there any other free programmes that is able to do this without having to pay?

[ARDILLA 0]

i don't know any free...i think, there aren't that would be of a high quality and has a lot of functiones, that might be useful. so, i've bought it. btw, it's only my opinion